As evidence of mankind's deleterious impact on the environment has continued to mount, research and development concerning renewable energy technology has increased commensurately. Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) represents one such field of technology. BIPV involves integrating solar panels into buildings while the buildings are under construction or renovation, wherein the solar panels replace traditional building components (i.e. roofs, walls, façades, skylights, etc.), rather than retroactively installing solar panels onto buildings after construction/renovation and in addition to traditional building components. By installing the solar panels during the initial construction or subsequent renovation and by using the solar panels in place of some traditional building components, labor and material costs are saved.
One area of BIPV that has recently attracted market attention is solar shingles, such as those produced by Tesla™. Solar shingles function as both solar panels (i.e. they convert sunlight into electricity) and traditional roofing shingles (i.e. they help to protect the building from inclement weather and serve to enhance its aesthetic appeal). Because conventional, rooftop solar panels are visually distinguishable from normal shingles, many consider them to be aesthetically unappealing. Solar shingles, in contrast, look and function like normal shingles, and so they integrate seamlessly into rooftops.
Despite the incredible technological advancement which solar shingles represent, they are not perfect. Current solar shingle systems require manual inspection and offer users no reliable way of conducting system diagnostics. For example, when a conventional solar shingle is damaged or obstructed, the power generation of the entire solar shingle system decreases. However, assuming that the user monitors the system diligently enough to notice the diminished power output, he/she does not know which shingles are affected. Moreover, the user does not know whether the affected shingles (whichever ones they may be) are actually damaged or are merely obstructed (i.e. by debris, leaves, shadows, bird droppings, etc.) or whether the sun had simply shone less during the previous monitoring period. Furthermore, even if the user correctly guesses that the affected shingles are damaged, he/she does not know which component of each affected shingle is to blame.
Additionally, current solar shingle systems require manual maintenance. In other words, the user (or the user's agent) must physically interact with the rooftop in order to clear any debris, leaves, or other obstruction that prevents the solar shingles from gathering as much sunlight as they otherwise would. Although the quick removal of leaves, a tree branch, or bird droppings is not necessarily overly burdensome to the user, the removal of snow and/or ice build-up in the winter can be time-consuming and dangerous.
Lastly, current solar shingles do not leverage the wealth of readily-available information that pertains to a building's power usage and generation. For example, conventional solar shingle systems do not dynamically take into consideration the real-time power usage of the building, the time of day, the season, any local weather forecasts, local electricity prices, etc. Making use of this information can help to optimize the power generation of the solar shingle system.
The subject claimed invention helps to address these short-comings of conventional solar shingles.